


The Bloodborne

by GerbilOfDestiny



Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Cosmicism, Gothic Horor, Inspired by Canon, Lovecraftian, Retelling, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:48:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29449545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GerbilOfDestiny/pseuds/GerbilOfDestiny
Summary: A retelling of the events of Bloodborne - done in my spare time as a writing exercise - chronicling the night of the twenty-fifth of February, 1925, when a young woman arrives in the fabled city of Yharnam and trades a cure for her ailing body for a night long hunt against cosmic horrors.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 3





	The Bloodborne

The moon was shining over Providence when she’d first heard whispers of old Yharnum, tucked away in the European mists, forgotten for centuries by all but the most dedicated of scholars.

Certainly there had been the occasional rumour that such a place had existed but these promises of sacred secrets and mystical societies had all vanished as quickly as they had come. You would find no mention of it in the twenty-nine volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica that had been published almost a decade ago, nor would you see it on the many maps or journals that filled the libraries of the prestigious Brown University and even those explorers who had roamed the European continent had batted the whole thing away as a mere superstition born out of the fears of vampires and witches. It was said that to believe in Yharnam was to believe in the fantastical.

Yet even beliefs such as these ones could be considered to have a basis in some small fragment of reality.

There was a woman who roamed the halls of this university, confined to a wheelchair as the result of an injury sustained in the Great War that had concluded a little under seven years beforehand. A red headed woman, some thirty-five years of age, committed to the studies of the past - from the texts that are accessible to men and those documents of a much more foreboding, heretical time - she was among the first to realise the significance of Yharnam’s past and the implications of its rediscovery.

The clue came from an undated letter, tucked away in a copy of the Kitab al-Azif, which had been dictated by a member of the community in which he proclaimed his admiration of the “Yharnam Myth”, as those of us in the academic community once called it, and I believe it necessary for the sake of the reader’s understanding to dictate what it was he had written, and why it was that his words had struck such a chord with the young red headed scholar.

> _My dearest Abigail,_
> 
> _Salutations to you and my obeisances to the Eternal Kos, the Great One of Great Ones who watches over us all. For years now we have been seekers of the truth of our existence, desperate to know how and why we have come to this tiny speck in an insignificant universe. You took me to the Arabian Peninsula in the pursuit of that Nameless City the mad Arabs once spoke of, to the South American bayous in the pursuit of the Dreamer’s Cult, and we even managed to find our way into the frozen north in pursuit of those mountains where so many succumbed to their madness years ago.Search after search after search and every time we come and go with nothing. I know that you will not believe these words I send you now, especially after the tumultuous dissolution of our marriage, but what I say to you now I say with the greatest sincerity and love a man can offer._
> 
> ___Yharnam is real!_ _ _
> 
> _____Yharnam is no myth and I know where it is. I know because I am here right now, sitting and awaiting your arrival. This city is a city of gods among men. I have seen them and I have heard them. I have felt their loving embrace and I have tasted of their flesh and their flood. The celestial apotheosis spoken of by so many Christian ministries is willingly handed out to all regardless of their practices and faith, for who needs faith when you can see the Great Ones with your own eyes!_ _ _ _ _
> 
> _______Come to Yharnam. Seek out the Paleblood and find exaltation in her loving embrace. Remember the scriptures you one held dear. Remember the promises of Revelation 21:3-4 and accept it through a secret communion with me. Your wounds shall be healed. Your shattered leg will no longer be so. Your aches and pains will leave you. You will transcend the feeble form you have and become like a god!_ _ _ _ _ _ _
> 
> _________A map to my current location, along with the coordinates, are included on the back of this letter. I will be eagerly awaiting your present arrival at the clinic. Find me there and tell no one else. Your beloved, Jeffery Steed.”  
>   
> _________

___It was but one letter and yet it was more than enough to convince her that she was on the path of finding a discovery unlike any other. A lost city. A hidden mystery. A mansion of the gods._ _ _

___The coordinates were for a city in the lands of the First Czechoslovakian Republic, hundreds of miles away from any other city and - going by the map - surrounded by thick swades of forestry that had protected it from prying eyes over countless centuries. Surely this must be the place?_ _ _

___Additional details could be gleaned from the crudely drawn map on the other side of the letter. These spoke of a university, a church, a hospital, and more homes than anyone could have illustrated in such a small piece of paper. What else could he have been describing except a bustling metropolis on par with London of New York?_ _ _

___Further investigations of the matter dug up the elusive Abigail spoken of in the letter. Abigail Steed, nee Brennan, had been born in October 1877, the daughter of a local doctor who had operated out of a small clinic in a nearby town. A curious figure; she had began as a medical practitioner before she met her husband, Jeffery Steed, in 1907. They’d gone on numerous expeditions together, often linked to occultic or ritualistic sites - almost certainly those sites referenced in the letter, and no doubt why the letter had been secreted away in such a blasphemous tome - before a disagreement had caused them to separate in 1910. Jeffery had then vanished from the picture before Abigail, now remarried to Nathan Brennan, left the city under mysterious circumstances on the eve of the Great War, never to be seen again._ _ _

___Perhaps she had found the city after all._ _ _

___Now, after finding this corroborating evidence of Abigail’s existence, there was no longer any doubt in the woman’s mind that this had to be the place._ _ _

___This was her Holy Grail. A pathway to the cure for her paralysis, the cancer that had been raging through her body for the past three years and a gateway to enlightenment that had been eluding her for so many years._ _ _

___Now I am sure that are many among you who read this record that would question why a single letter was enough to inspire such hope when the claim of finding an ancient city would, in normal circumstances, inspire naught but scepticism. The answer is that the woman had already exhausted every other opportunity she had. No surgeon had been able to heal her paralysis, no doctor had been able to prescribe a treatment for her cancer that would force it into a permanent remission and her time was now running out._ _ _

___What would she have to lose if she went seeking health and enlightenment through a single scrap of letter?_ _ _

___That is why she took the paper, her passport, her wealth and her clothes - all the things that she deemed necessary under such circumstances - and betook her path to Yharnam. There were no teary eyed farewells to friends or colleagues, no parties and no condolences. Barely anyone noticed the young women when she made her way down to Union Station, paid her fee and began the long and arduous task of reaching the city that the rest of the world had forgotten._ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, this is my first chapter of what I hope to be an ongoing work - I am already writing the second - and would love feedback on my writing.
> 
> I’m new to formatting on this site so please forgive me for any errors in formatting that occur as I embark on this journey.


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